 My name is Kamalan Chiravnath. I'm currently a student at NYU. I just finished my junior year. I'm also the co-founder to a non-profit called Voices. So Voices, I founded when I was 14 years old. We are organization dedicated to uplifting the lives of abused women and children, specifically those stateless. We permanently run two programs. One is a volunteering program for orphans that were abandoned by rape survivors and rape victims. And we run a funding program for shelters, for stateless people near the border of Thailand and Burma. So allow me to tell you a little bit about how I ended up here, I guess, at a relatively young age. So I grew up in a family business of agro-industrial market and contrary to, you know, stigmas surrounding big businesses that there are only about profit-making and CSRs about PR. I never found that. So ever since I was young, I was greatly inspired by my father and my aunt's CSR programs. And so that was where my passion started. My family never kind of pushed me to do family business. They gave me a whole array of opportunities to figure out what I was passionate about and what I wanted to pursue. And so that led me to co-founding voices and now I'm studying social work and social entrepreneurship at NYU in New York. When I was in middle school, which is when I started this organization, I was volunteering at many orphanages around Thailand and just because I had a passion for helping little children. But soon I learned that a lot of these children were abandoned by rape survivors. And I guess with, you know, the growing curiosity of teenagers, I was constantly trying to get to root causes of these issues. And but at that age shelters in Thailand weren't really open to having a group of high school students interview rape survivors and rape victims because it's a very sensitive issue. And so I decided to go to the more rural parts of Thailand where they were more desperate for help. And this led me to traveling to Masawd in a province called Chiang Rai near the northern of Thailand with a great population of stateless people. At that time I thought that I'd only be meeting with rape survivors, but little did I know the shelter that I went to were all children and women that were stateless. And so this is where I learned that underserved women and children are ready at risk for abuse, rape, and trafficking. But if you add statelessness into the equation, the risks is heightened beyond what would be inhumane. The children I work with, they range from infants to kids that were my age at that time, which was 14. When I was 14, one of the first girls I met who had been raped was the same age as me. And so this is something that is very dear to my heart and something I'm very passionate about. So a little bit about statelessness is a person who is not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law. And this means that stateless people have no national identification and have no access to rights under the national law. Also Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also states that nationality is an inherent right to which all human beings should be entitled to. So the world's current stateless population that is reported is 10 million people. In ASEAN, there's 1.7 million. And in Thailand, which is where I'm from, is 443,862. The reason why I would like to emphasize report, however, is that stateless people, especially generational stateless people that I'll clarify on later, live their lives in the shadows in fear of persecution. So their lives aren't documented by governments of any state. And so I think it's safe to assume that in all these statistics, there are much more. So I think the best example and the best descriptions of these issues are real stories. This is a woman who I call Sunshine just to protect her identification. She's the first stateless woman that has been through abuse, trafficking and various forms of rape that I met and that opened up to me and told me her story. This is a picture that I took from the first time I met her in 2010. And this is my latest picture that I had with her in 2014. This is her youngest son. She has two toddlers. Both children were born through rape. They never met their father. Their mother does not know who their father is. I call her Sunshine, however, because the first time I met her, I wasn't aware of her plight and her smile just shone through me. When I learned that for the past six to seven years of her life, she has been abused, raped and trafficked. Every time she'd crossed the border from Burma to Thailand, she'd be raped by soldiers or just, you know, anyone who had that intention near the border because stateless people, they don't have the ability or they fear that if they report the abuses against them, they'll be incarcerated for actually being in the country. And so they're voiceless in some sense. She had a boyfriend that she mentioned and who beat her. And so I was curious as to why she would stay with someone who beat her. And so I asked her in hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have, but because I was very curious at that time, I asked her if she ever loved her boyfriend. And she said yes. She said she loved him because he didn't rape her. He only beat her. And so that was her definition of love. So this photo was taken half a year before she went back to visit her mother in Burma. And she was falsely accused and sentenced to 12 years in prison on the Burmese side. She's currently still in prison. When I finally heard from her, she expressed that other than missing her two children, she felt safer in prison. So can you imagine if love meant abuse and safety meant incarceration? So it's important to note that these things that they go through has been going on for decades, maybe even centuries, because of the voicelessness that triggered by their fear of persecution. Her child, her children, has no rights to education, future employment, as does she. They have no rights to anything that we would have the rights to. On this very day when I arrived, her child was having a very high fever, but was unable to seek help from any hospital. Because of his lack of national identification. And so we had to scramble through and find the nearest pharmacy and just buy, you know, over the counter fever medication. This child also has a defected lung. And he until today, he has no access to the rightful health care. And she has two children, one child we believe, although there is no proof that she was born on the Burmese side. However, her youngest son was born on the Thai side. But yet, even though he was born on the Thailand side, he has no national identification. Thailand's Nationality Act, though it has been revised and has been improving from 2012 to 2016, the Thai government has granted citizenship to 23,000 stateless people. However, the Nationality Act still emphasizes that one parent of the child must be of Thai nationality or the child themselves to have a Thai birth certificate to prove to the authorities. Most stateless children are not afforded birth certificates when they are born. And so that is that is their life. That is what they're entitled to and what they're not entitled to. And so I'd like to close this section with asking you if this is what we would categorize as being human. If you see her and her children right now, they're no different to one of us. The only different that they have is their status, is their legal status. Some were not born in Thailand, some were born in Thailand. But are they not entitled to basic human rights, such as health care, education and employment? And if they're not, they're subjected to being involved in the illegal jobs that that is burdening our country. So by not accepting them, we are also burning our country. Whereas most government officials would say that by accepting them, it is the burden. So it's kind of a conflicting standpoint where most stateless people who are adults that are from generational descent are involved in drug trafficking. And this is because they have no opportunities to do any other job. But yet because they're involved in criminal activity, they are all labeled as criminals. But for children, how are we to say that a four year old child or a two year old child is a criminal just because of the legal status? I personally believe that nobody should be legally invisible. Thank you. I'd like to open to questions now. Can you share with us some of the projects that you have worked on under voices? So what have you done to these stateless people? So as I previously mentioned, we primarily ran two funding programs. But I guess for our volunteering program, it is not specifically for stateless people. It is run at an orphanage in Thailand that were left by rape survivors. But for the stateless people, we have funded two shelters in the same province of Chiang Rai that support stateless people. Around 90 percent of these shelters are children and the 10 percent would be women. We rarely see men coming to these shelters because there are those who are, I guess, still working in the drug trafficking area where women seek refuge when they cross the borders with their children. So we provide them with basic medical aid, medical care. I also have been working with a lawyer from UNHCR to work on possible cases that we could help them get citizenship. Whereas, but I would say that around 20 percent of all the children we've worked with, their cases are able to be appealed. But for most cases, it's it's almost helpless if the Nationality Act doesn't get reformed further. We also provide funding through like fundraising. Recently, it's been more through the channel of donations. But when we're more active in high school, I think it's also important to note that this organization was formed when my whole team were the same age, we're 14 and we're high school friends. When we graduated high school, we are now in different universities all around the world. So it's hard to really come together and do the kind of fundraising activities as we did. But for about four years, we ran various fundraising activities such as charity concerts, the classic bake sales and selling the products that the stateless women were making would bring them back to Bangkok and sell them at various venues. So I understand that you've worked with the UNHCR. I'm Thai as well. And Thailand, I think to convince the government, you need a certain I'm not sure who, but a certain kind of organization or individuals with certain leverage. So my question is, who do you think are those individuals or organizations apart from UNHCR with that leverage? And currently, are they engaged with this effort at all? I'd like to credit Dr. Kittipong Kittiarak, who used to be our former permanent Secretary of Justice. Currently, he is operating and the director of Thailand's Institute of Justice. I really believe that this institute is one of the key components to driving this forward. And the reason why I say this and maybe not so much as the UNHCR is because I think in Thailand, we still have this sense of I'm not sure if it's false, but perhaps misplaced sense of nationalism, where we tend to trust more through those with our national identification, which is also a problem why we have so much distrust with these stateless people. And but however, because the Thailand Institute of Justice is run by Thai people and by a respected Thai figure, I believe that they have a lot of influence in this area. But I still believe that the the key people who can really make a difference are legislators and Thai politicians. If they can shift their focus from the differences that we have with them to the similarities, I think that that that is our driving force. There is the feeling that there is at work and unstoppable force applied to an immovable rock. In other words, the the UN states that everybody is entitled to a nationality and yet every country dictates what are the conditions that are necessary to to fulfill in order to get that nationality. What is the stake that the UN has in order to help these these people? And and it doesn't need to be applied specifically to Thailand, but but somewhere to the nexus, whether it's Myanmar, whether it's Laos, whether the country is in the region where you have these these people without nationality. So the UN Declaration of Human Rights, however, I think, especially in developing countries, have not been signed by them. So it is up to the prime ministers of each country to sign these Declaration of Human Rights. And the countries that have signed this Declaration of Human Rights have policies and laws and processes to help the stateless people. But for countries that have yet to sign these human rights, they still have that room for discrimination and segregation with these areas. So I think if we can push the the various governments who have yet to sign the UN Declaration of Human Rights to sign the UN Declaration of Human Rights, I think that that would be a great starting point. I like to also maybe provide what I think we should start with. And I think, you know, trying to get citizenship for people for the past few years of my life, I find that because there is so much distrust, especially with the the adult generation of the stateless people, because of the various illegal jobs that they might be involved in, I think that it might help to start with children. Because I feel like if we start with children, there is very little that can be refuted about the rights that these child are entitled to as human beings. And there is no chance that an infant can be Kettergeist as a criminal. Do you have any success stories, like in the times that you've been working with these women and children, I mean, either be it adults or children that have actually been able to get citizenship? So I guess I'd like to do a success story and a story of something that I've yet to succeed in. So her children in Thailand, even though they are not granted citizenship, we have been able to give both her children what in Thailand would Kettergeist as a pink card. And so these pink cards assure that they're legally able to stay in our country. However, these pink cards don't entitle them to any rights to employment or health care. It entitles them to education until fifth grade and residency. So personally, I wouldn't say this is a success, but with all the legal cumbersome standpoints, I think if we can start by the pink cards and work on reforming the justice system to provide, I guess, more rights under the pink card, I think that would really help. But as for Sunshine, she is still incarcerated in Burma. I just want to ask you a question about the Rohingya, which are considered stateless by many more countries, right away from Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia. And here there's a little bit of cultural similarity, looks-wise as well. These other people, unfortunately, we have to use that word, other people are completely alien. How is that happening and are you interacting? And you've seen the Rohingya also getting involved in these issues because up in Indonesia, down in Indonesia, we are also getting that. And not that we're handling it very well. And what's been your interaction with that? I have to say that stateless people, there's, I guess, kind of two categories that we could define their origin from. Some were born stateless, some became stateless. And the Rohingya population is an example of stateless people who became stateless. They're stripped of their national identification in hopes that they would find a safer and new and better life. However, the population that I have been working with are a little different. So I have more experience with people who are generational stateless. But if I could provide some opinion on the Rohingya, I think that, like as I previously mentioned, we all are not only visibly similar, we're all also part of the same region. And so maybe it would help to expand our definition of nationalism into nationalism. So if we're all part of the same region, why are we still kind of still pushing the responsibilities to all the other regions that are still struggling just as our own? Most of us are still from developing countries. And so efforts such as migration dialogues and migration compacts between these developing countries would definitely solve the, or at least help alleviate the plight of the Rohingyas. I think the communication between these countries involved must be much more improved. And the sense of responsibility to our nation must also be extended to the sense of responsibility for all human beings. Does your organization get involved in maybe placements like through international adoptions and things? Because I guess there's a lot of groups of people who can't have children of their own for whatever reason, whether that's medical or social. And are there channels that you've worked with, the UN or other national governments through international adoptions perhaps? Sadly, it is illegal to adopt a stateless child because the child, yes. So obviously legal adoptions are very safe and detailed as a nature as they are because it is the life of children. So if a child doesn't have national identification, they don't have access to be part of the adoption agencies. So these shelters, they're just there. And what we can provide them with, which actually I guess I forgot to mention, that we do provide them with, I guess, vocational training for these children to hopefully one day be able to apply for the citizenship themselves if they have been in Thailand for long enough and have proven to be a productive participation of our nation to apply for themselves. But in terms of adoption, sadly, it is not currently a possibility.